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While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear.

Isak Dinesen

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Isak Dinesen
Ideas
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Even
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Idea
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Intolerable
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Young
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More quotes by Isak Dinesen

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Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.
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I don't believe in evil I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.
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In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself-all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married.
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I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
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For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.
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There are times of great beauty on a coffee farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist of the drizzling rain.
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Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.
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It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.
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The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity . I was a painter before I was a writer and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes.
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It's an odd feeling-farewell-there is some envy in it. Men go off to be tested for courage and if we're tested at all, it's for patience, for doing without, for how well we can endure loneliness.
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When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.
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through the loveliness and power of her dream world she was now, in her old frock and botched shoes, very likely the loveliest, mightiest and most dangerous person on earth
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It is little silly to be a caricature of something of which you know very little, and which means very little to you, but to be your own caricature — that is the true carnival!
Isak Dinesen
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God made the world, My Lord, and looked at it, and saw that it was good. Yes. But what if the world had looked back at him, to see whether he was good or not?
Isak Dinesen
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Humanity has made a great error in seizing on a certain moment, no more intrinsically notable than any other moment and has called it Birth. The habit of honoring one single instant of the universal process to the disadvantage of other instants has done more, perhaps, than anything to obfuscate the crystal clearness of the fundamental flux.
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It is when people are told their own thoughts that they think they are being insulted.
Isak Dinesen
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I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.
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My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady.
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I had seen a herd of Elephant travelling through dense native forest ... pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world.
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I don't think... one get a flash of happiness once, and never again it is there deep within you.
Isak Dinesen